musical musings from the frozen north:
torontopia, mont royal city and kawartha kottages

Friday, May 23, 2014

Let's Talk About Owen Pallett: Carl Wilson

When writing about Owen
Pallett, as I do in this week’s issue of Maclean’s (on newsstands now), there’s
only one other writer I would ever cite as a secondary source: Carl Wilson.

As a member of the Hidden
Cameras in the early 2000s, Pallett played “Ban Marriage” at Wilson’s wedding;
Wilson provided Pallett with his first major American press with a New York
Timesprofile. Wilson invited Pallett to contribute an essay to the recent reprint
of Wilson’s treatise about Céline Dion and subjectivity in music, Let’s Talk About Love; Pallett performed
“The Power of Love” at the book’s original launch party back in 2007. These are
two of the only men I know who might discuss semiotic theory while scratching
each other’s back.

My favourite quote from my
recent conversation with Owen is his summation of what the Torontopia movement
was all about: “Carl Wilson with his shirt off, like no fucking problem.”

I have a lot of my own
theories about and passions for Pallett’s music, but Carl is clearly much
smarter than I am. As is always the case with these
kinds of profiles, I only used a sentence of this conversation in my Maclean’s piece. Here’s our full
conversation.

Carl Wilson

April 23, 2014

Phone from his Toronto
apartment

How do you know Owen?

I met Owen through the Hidden
Cameras, through Maggie [MacDonald] and Joel [Gibb]. I didn’t talk to him that
much. Through the first year or two we knew each other, we didn’t really have
conversations. He seemed like a distant and removed kind of guy. Which I don’t
think was true, but he does have that kind of guard when you first meet him.
Only after I started seeing [Pallett’s first band as frontman] Les Mouches and
was really enthusiastic about them, then I started talking to him directly. He
briefly ran a series at the Monarch Tavern, and I wrote about that for the Globe, so that was when I first
interviewed him. The way I got to know him mostly was by interviewing him.

Most Canadians, if they are aware of Owen at
all, first heard of him when he won the inaugural Polaris Prize in 2006 for He Poos Clouds. For me, knowing who was on the jury—Torontonians and other jurors,
like yourself, for whom Owen wasn’t a completely unknown entity—the win wasn’t
that surprising, but it was treated as some kind of freak upset win by
mainstream press. What do you remember about that time?

I think he was already kind
of inured to that kind of exposure. We think of that Polaris moment as being
pivotal, but probably what was more pivotal to his career was opening for
Arcade Fire. That involvement gave him a fan base he wouldn’t have got any
other way. By that point he was an old hand dealing with press and attention. I
think he let that all roll out gracefully and had a good humour about the
remarks about the album name. Obviously, the name is a perfect case of Owen’s
balance of sarcastic whimsy and utter seriousness. His win was more interesting
for what it meant for Polaris. In some ways, Polaris’s identity could have been
established in any number of ways. I can’t talk about what happened in the jury
room, but it wasn’t a surprising decision when we got to the end of the
discussion. I think it established Polaris as a more adventurous kind of prize
than it would have been if one of the other leading contenders had won.

Is an artist like Owen more easily understood
today than in 2006, now that we’re 10 years into the dissolution of genre
boundaries and what’s known as poptimism?

I think he’s a segment of a
certain independent musician who once would have been more stubbornly avant-garde
and now has a more eclectic approach. He’s a particular subset, bringing his
classical training to that music. You see in indie music of the last 10 years
the emergence of strings and of horns, often just for colouration, but in
Owen’s case it’s really integral. That also informs his skepticism about indie
orthodoxies. He’s already been through one set of ideologies that he has to
resist in order to do what he does. So he’s unlikely to be swayed by a new set
of ideologies. What he’s done, more than others, is to take the best of that
kind of old-style indie thinking and continue to concern himself with having
control over his own destiny and have some kind of loyalty to where he comes
from, in terms of conducting his career. The fact that he continued working with
Blocks [Recording Club record label] for so long after his initial success, I
saw as a real sign of character.

Owen covered Mariah Carey and Jann Arden early
in his career, as well as Joanna Newsom and John Cale. How does that play into
the thesis of your book, about how we define ourselves by our taste in music?

One of the first things that
made me sit up and take notice was with Les Mouches when they were covering “Close
to You” by the Carpenters. Not that it was a unique indie rock move at the
time, but there was an earnestness to their delivery, very tender but with an
edge to it. That curatorial sense that he has was something I took notice of. His
sensibility has always embraced vulnerability and truthfulness and
professionalism—all of these things that were in some ways uncool. He was one
of the first people I met who made me feel like the sensibility I was talking
about in the book was at a twilight at the time. Young people growing up with a
more eclectic listening experience and music-acquiring experience were forging
new sensibilities. Seeing that made me aware of the contrasts in the way music
has been talked about and the way it’s lived in their lives. He’s in sync with
that. At the same time, he spends a lot of time in a reasonably snobby indie music
scene. So he has a sense of those problems and struggles with himself, where
one draws the lines in tastes, and plays with that in his own work.

What do you think being an Owen Pallett fan
says about someone? What kind of cultural capital does that give them?

Quite a lot of cultural
capital! If you think of it as adjacent to Arcade Fire, where most of his fans
may come from, it’s the kind of fan who pays attention to a bands’ opening acts
and liner notes. There’s an investment in being a connoisseur. I think a lot of
his fans also have some involvement in classical music. I’ve never seen a fan
message board more involved in talking about scores and arrangements.

How does In Conflict fit into the
evolution of his work?

It’s an amazing album. It
makes me look a little differently at the previous couple of records. It’s so
much more emotionally direct, in the ways the first album was, but that was a
very small-scale thing whereas this is grander. I had an immediate emotional
connection with these songs in ways I didn’t with older songs. Heartland is transitional for me, and
this record is a fulfillment of what he was going for there. I think it’s significant
that he’s playing with [Les Mouches] Matt [Smith] and Rob [Gordon] again;
there’s a personal touch in the lyrics and narratives that remind me of what
Les Mouches were doing, and reminds me of how affecting I found that at the
time: confessional in the literal sense, but with that careful line-walking he does
so that it doesn’t become indulgent or mired in self-pity.

More than any other artist I know, he seems to
be endless involved in detailed conversations with people online. I’m kind of
fascinated with how he’s able to be so productive and yet so seemingly
distracted at the same time.

He wants to be in the fray,
but he also wants to be all by himself composing. He is a classic
introvert/extrovert. Anybody who is productive in an information-dense form has
to have some kind of compulsive tendencies. When he’s working, he gets a ton
done very fast, because he’s moving very fast in his mind, and then he takes a
break and has some soup and he’s bored and he’s on the Internet. It’s that
crash-and-burn speed to him. He’s talked about that being one of the subjects
of the new album.

Do you think his early success was only
possible in a situation like Torontopia, an era of anything goes?

The milieu in which he
started to make pop music was one where there was a conceptual approach to
music-making in general; it was much more similar to an art-school or visual
art aesthetic. I think the Hidden Cameras influenced a lot of people in that
direction, in being the first breakout success. Also a band that many people
passed through, so they were influenced by that working technique. The cluster
of people around Blocks took that kind of conceptual framework and applied it
to their own approaches. Stuff like Bad Bands was the most extreme end of that
way of thinking, of saying these bands are more or less just ideas than they
are music. They have to be enjoyed from that point of view. It’s hard to guess
what Owen might have done if he hadn’t had that kind of apprenticeship, but it’s
possible to imagine him making more conventional Sufjan-esque pop music in a
way. It seemed clear that exposure through that music scene permanently sent
him in that direction.